Franco-Greek film director and philospher Yannis Youlantas meets his audience Yannis Youlountas talks about Greece, the meaning of crisis, fascism and people’s coping responses after a recent screening of “Ne vivons plus comme des esclaves” (Rough translation: ‘Let’s no longer live like slaves’). The rights-free documentary is due for internet release on September 25th via […]
Development reporting suffers exactly the same sort of problems as does journalism that purports to cover conventional politics and economics – probably worse even. Too much focus on official sources and too little questioning of mainstream Western ideas about what countries and their citizens must do to “develop”. All the arguments of Fraudcast News with […]
Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31. Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global. There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging […]
I watched the extraordinarily moving documentary Brother Number One last night, one I’d meant to catch when covering the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London. It tells the story of a New Zealander who was captured, tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. The film’s great success is to use one person’s tale, […]
I’ve spent some of the past few days working with Glenn McMahon on covering the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London for visionOntv. We ended our interview series by asking HRW’s Andrea Holley on her organisation’s thinking about the hows and whys of these video fests. Are they preaching to the choir, reaching out […]
I’m due to interview Bettina Borgfeld for visionOntv later today to talk about Raising Resistance, a film she co-directed with David Bernet about the fight of the small farmers of South America against industrial agriculture. The subject is one close to my heart, I covered a version of it over many years while working for Reuters […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNMAhN6PwAE&w=560&h=315] Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt, director of the documentary Black Block, explains how work by independent media helped piece together the story of unprovoked Italian police violence at the G8 2001 summit meeting in Genoa. (Italian with English interpretation). His film features powerful testimonies by some of the dozens of activists who were savagely […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq95DvG8ZWE] Journalist Mark Covell was beaten unconscious by Italian police during the 2001 Genoa G8 summit. He speaks here about the power of independent media and how independent journalists should buddy up, train and prepare to cover potentially violent demos so as to keep safe. He was speaking before a screening of Black Block, […]
